Archive for the English Anime Category


Yuri Anime: My Zhime (Mai Otome), Volume 1 (English

August 31st, 2007

How many fanfics have we seen where the main characters are transplanted to a different location, time or situation than the original source material? The Senshi at an agricultural college, the girls of Marimite visiting (or attending school in) some North American location that just *happens* to be the same place the author lives or attends. There are many series that do that kind of thing within the context of the actual series.

Star Trek:Next Generation used their omnipresent Holodeck to allow a sort of time and space travel (mostly so we could see that characters play dress up) and Xena:Warrior Princess had a few stories which fans called “Uber-Xena” stories, in which Gabrielle and Xena were portrayed as more modern, but equally as silly, characters. (Which led to a whole genre of “Uber-Xena” stories, many of which were better than the actual series. I wrote one Uber-Xena story myself, In the Hall of the Mountain Queen, a title which came to me in a very memorable dream.)

And so we find ourselves regarding the series, My Zhime, aka Mai Otome, in which the characters of Fuuka Academy from My HiME are now suddenly on a planet much like our earth, but more feudal. The HiME are now become Otome – the human nuclear arsenal of each country. The school at which young women are trained to become Otome candidates, Garderobe, is the center of the new conflict. And while all the characters from HiME are moved to the new time/place/location/ their roles, ages and, in some cases personalities, have been altered to fit the new storyline.

I had planned of holding off reviewing this series at all until I finished reviewing all of the My HiME DVDs, but last weekend I decided that I wanted to watch Volume 1. Then, as I watched it, I remembered all over again why I thought it was a vastly superior series to the original. Mostly because it starts off as stupid fun with a hint of plot, continues to be stupid fun with an actual plot, and ends as stupid fun and who cares about the plot, which short side trips to wallow into meaningless angst. The difference is that, IMHO, HiME primarily wallowed in angst with pretensions of having a Serious Plot ™, when in reality, it was all meaningless angst and plot was a self-fulfilling prophecy with reset.

My Zhime, Volume 1, starts off with the arrival of a strange girl from out of the wastelands, at the sophisticated and cosmopolitan city of Windbloom. Yumemiya Arika is strange in the she is a stranger, and that she is clearly an uncultured bumpkin……and she’s just kind of strange, too. But in a good-hearted, honest bumpkiny kind of way. She’s convinced that her mother was, or maybe is, an Otome, so after her guardian dies, she’s come to Garderobe to find her mother. After she witnesses the coolness that is Meister Shizuru Violeta, the Graceful Amethyst, Arika decides to become an Otome, as well.

This plunges her directly into intrigue and politics on both the micro- and macro-cosmic levels, as the great rulers decide her fate and in school as the new student is assessed for her level of threat to the status quo. Because not everyone at Garderobe will become an Otome – only the most talented few. Arika’s immediate rival, Nina, can’t stand the girl, so of course they are assigned to be roommates, along with sweet, blonde, starlet-like Erstin. And this is when I remembered how much I liked this series.

As Arika runs around Garderobe trying to find the council and defend herself (and Chie gets her first lesbian cred powerup) she’s the butt (pun intentional) of many stupid physical, servicey gags. But as she runs around, and later, as she meets her new classmates, I found myself happy to see every familiar face, from Yukino and her pet Haruka, to Ers, or Irina. In fact, as Irina introduced herself I felt something almost nostalgic blossom within me.

This is your basic shounen heroine action series. There will be many battles of one kind or another; an outclassed, apparently idiot savant heroine who will battle her way to the top; magical/mecha creatures; did I mention battles?; conspiracies, politics, intrigue on the grand scale and bullying, teasing and misunderstanding on the small scale; and service.

Yuri in Volume 1 is limited to a single knowing look shot at Natsuki by Shizuru, as she teases Arika in a decidedly sexual way, and Chie’s instant high reading on the Yuri-ometer. Yuri in Zhime is a popular fetish, so we’ll be seeing more as the story progresses.

Art – 8
Characters – 8
Story – 7
Music – 7
Yuri – 3
Service – 6

Overall – 7

All the characters I like are older, cooler and gayer. Is it any wonder I like this series better? ^_^





Burst Angel Anime, Volume 2 (English)

August 21st, 2007

Burst Angel, Volume 2 starts off in the middle of a story which is suspiciously similar to the infamous hentai anime, Bible Black. And that’s about the best thing about the whole volume. ^_^;

Let me stop here and offer my thanks to Daniel P. who sponsored today’s review! Yay!

Meg is undercover at a creepy private girls’ school in which students are going missing or going insane. She is schmoozed mightily by the ultimate star of the school, while she tries to find out the dirt behind the “Ishtar club” – the exclusive, elite, star-chamber cabal that everyone admires, desires and fears. To everyone’s (everyone that has never seen Bible Black, that is) surprise Meg finds herself attacked by a demon. Jo is forced to put on the school uniform just long enough to allow Meg to be kidnapped so she can rescue her from the demon-y evil thing at the center of the mystery. It is a great shock to us all to learn the true identity of the demon is….!

The second two episodes deal with a giant robot crow who kidnaps girls and therefore takes a stab at kidnapping Meg so Jo can fire up Jango and rescue her. Jo is successful, sadly. In the course of this arc, we learn that the occasional glowing brain is not just a shiny special effect, but an actual plot complication. Also, Kyouhei is injected with an SPCD (Stupid Plot Complication Disorder.) In this case, a virus that takes 6 hours to germinate within his body and then will kill him spectacularly. (Okay, they don’t say it’ll be spectacular, but I like to project.) Under the guise of saving Meg, Jo drags Kyouhei all around town pointlessly, in order for them to bond.

While the plots of this volume ain’t all that, the extras are. Once again, we have English voice commentary and Japanese radio dramas.

The English voice commentary is amusing. They comment on totally random things, background characters, Sei-who-is-not-Beth’s gravity-defying breasts, and the fact that the point on Jango’s head is supposed to be a cowboy hat, not a dunce cap. (Something I completely missed. Who has the dunce cap now, Erica? Huh?)

The Japanese radio dramas are strange and awkward, but amusing, as well. Watanabe Akeno (Jo) and Toyoguchi Megumi (Meg) do things like have a tongue-twister show downs, try to record a play written by a viewer with sound/fx and all, and have an entire segment where they speak in piercing, dog-whistle high-pitched voices about beer.

Not happy with just actually having cool extras, the liner notes are full of pictures and commentary. Very shiny.

Ratings:

Art – wildly inconsistent, but it averages at about a 6
Characters – 5
Story – 5
Yuri – 1
Service – 6

Overall – 5

The extras are so good, it’s *almost* as if they’re trying to make up for the lack of content in the anime.





My HiME Anime, Volume 5 (English)

August 6th, 2007

Okay, here’s the problem. You’re a teenager, a girl, with some serious powers, a magical beast companion and, you learn, a destiny. But, the person telling you what your destiny is, is the smarmiest roach of a guy you’ve ever met. And the destiny he’s telling you that you have is to fight a malevolent force – but only after you’ve defeated all the people you think of as your friends first.

You see the problem, right?

The answer is, “Nagi. You’re a tick and none of us trust you. It might be true what you say, and the person who reigns supreme after we fight will have the power of all twelve HiME…but we *already* have that power as 12 HiME. So instead of fighting one another, we’re gonna kick *your* ass, and then take on the evil whatmacallit.”

Of course, that would end the plot now and we wouldn’t get two and a half more volumes of pure, unadulterated angst in which to wallow. So that’s no good.

So here we are at My HiME, Volume 5. Our menu for today includes beating Mai to death with the angst stick and for dessert, making Mikoto cry. But it’s all IMPORTANT, so that’s okay. Without all this angst, our characters would have no impetus to make bad decisions and do the thing Nagi said they would do.

The DVD extras on this volume include a servicey Midori looking at her own choices in life, a Yuri-service Mashiro/Fumi vignette, Akira’s feelings about Takumi and Takumi talking to Mai.

More importantly, this volume includes the much-screencapped scene where Shizuru gives away her feelings for Natsuki briefly, as she plays with a sleeping Natsuki’s hair. Aside from the implied emotions, it’s a very pretty scene.

Also, while not Yuri, the gender-bendy Akira and Takumi have a genuinely sweet scene, which IMHO is probably the best scene of the volume.

Some attempt is made to give Tate a personality, but it’s wasted effort, really.

So, allowing for the obvious flaw in reasoning (and who would expect a bunch of 16 and 17-year olds to reason things through, anyway?) and the incessant beating of Mai and by extension Mikoto, which is the main driver of the plot, Volume 5 is quite good.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Character – 6
Story – 7
Yuri – 3
Service – 7
Angst – 9 and still rising

Overall – 7





Yuri Anime: Doki Doki School Hours, Volume 4 (English)

July 29th, 2007

Today’s review is Doki Doki School Hours Volume 4, or “How you know an anime (that had a pretty thin plot in the first place) has jumped the shark.” ^_^ Many, many thanks to Ted for sponsoring today’s review – your support is greatly appreciated! (And note to Ted: no space settings, but it does have chicks in suits, so good/bad.)

School life in Japan. Classwork, school festivals, exams. How many anime cover these things and the joys of summer vacation, the class trip, transfer students, etc, etc? Many, I’m sure. But how many anime also cover dystopian realities in which manga is outlawed, or hotel stays that end up being survival exercises with visits to the hot springs people,or alt-universe versions of their own plot in which all the characters are suddenly brothers and sisters?

Few, I wager.

Yes, in the fourth volume of Doki Doki, the writers of Mika-sensei and her second-year students at Okitsu High suddenly get sick and tired of their own plots, and start randomly adding silly alternative universe stories starring their own characters. There is no rhyme or reason for these stories, half of them have no particular tie-in to the story at hand. But because they are entertaining, who, really, cares? ^_^

The volume begins with a trip to the beach which ends up in an exclusive hotel which, for no good reason, has a jungle ride through an extensive in-hotel onsen. This leads to the students getting lost, braving monsters and onsen-people and waterfalls. In the hotel. Yes.

Okitsu gets a transfer student – from America! He’s the usual Aryan type (because all Americans are blond/e and blue-eyed. all of us) but this time, he is also – an otaku! The students boggle as his Japanese, which is fluent, is also incomprehensibly filled with otaku terms like “moe.” His appearance leads to the dystopia scenario, where manga is illegal and Kitagawa looks good in a suit. ^_^

Back in “reality” the sports festival is approaching. Cross-dressing Seki is dissed by the girls when he suggests that he wears a cheerleading costume, but they flock to Kitagawa when she appears in Japanese traditional boy’s uniform, the gakuran. ^_^ This was my favorite moment of the volume, easily.

The last episode is a totally bizarre alternate universe story in which Mika and all the students are suddenly siblings (which in no way lessens Kitagawa’s feeling for “big sister Mika”) whose mother runs a ramen shop. It’s just….wtf. As if the writers decided to write a fanfic for the series, because no one stopped them from doing so.

With the exception of the the shenanigans in the hotel, I liked this volume a lot. It was totally random, it made no sense, but it’s not like this anime was super intelligent or deep to begin with. Yes, it jumped the shark. As I said earlier, who, really, cares?

I’m not sure I’d recommend this series for a beginner in anime – too many of the jokes are parodies of Japanese culture and life to be easy to understand for the newbie, but if you’ve seen/read more than a dozen school-type anime or manga, you ought to get most of it.

Ratings –

Art – 6
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Yuri – 4
Service – 3

Overall – 6

Kitagawa remains totally lesbian, Seki is still a cross-dresser, Kudo is still gay.





Yuri Anime: Battle Athletes, Volume 1

July 16th, 2007

Sorry for not posting for the last few days – I’ve been juggling trying to get ready for Otakon this weekend, and catching up on myself. Before we begin today, let’s offer up paeans of thanks to Eric who provided us with the subject of today’s review! Thank you Eric!

Battle Athletes, Volume 1 is…old school. Old school art, hair, opening theme, character design, everything. It’s so old school that a few minutes after turning it on, I had to turn it off to regroup mentally. ^_^ Once mentally prepared, I turned it back on – and was pretty pleased with what I saw. It took some retrofitting my brain used, as I am, to what’s currently running now, to enjoy the old animation, the whiny heroine and the screaming. There was a *lot* of screaming.

The story follows Kanzaki Akari, the daughter of the former greatest athlete in the universe, Tomoe Midori, on her quest to become the world’s greatest female athlete and win the title her mother held – Cosmos Beauty.

Unfortunately for Akari, she has inherited few of her mother’s traits. She appears to have barely any athletic skills, is a crybaby and generally whiny. Of course it can’t stay like that, because then there’d be no story, so when Akari is moved to save another competitor’s life, her heretofore non-existent athletic skills skyrocket into hypercompetence.

Thankfully for the audience, Akari is surrounded by much more interesting characters. There’s the offensive Chinese stereotype Ling-Pha, and the strange “weird foreign tribal-type” stereotype Tanya. Then there’s Akari’s best friend Ichino who, voiced by Hisakawa Aya, is the perfect Osaka stereotype. Completing the main cast is Russian stereotype Ayla and America stereotype Jessie. And one of the things I thought while I watched the latter two compete was that, when this anime was made, the concept of US vs Russia athletic competition was far more politically charged and intense than it is now. ^_^ Now, anyone under the age of 20 (if we could get them to sit still for this anime at all) would be like, “so?”

The basic idea of the anime is that we are following these women as they train to attend the Satellite Training Camp, where they will be training even harder to try and become competitors for Cosmos Beauty. So we see a variety of futuristic and often silly “athletic” competition. And a variety of service as well, since of course as female athletes they never wear pants.

Compared to later episodes, Volume 1 is marginally gay…except for those moments when it’s massively gay.

Ichino pings most people’s gaydar right off, something that’s borne out in later volumes. But I kind of think Akari has it right when she says that Ichino is like an older brother to her.

Ayla and Jessie, by virtue of being powerful, talented athletic women who seem to be very focused on one another read totally gay…even if, in a real-world situation, they’d just be excellent rivals and maybe friends.

Jessie, the less lesbian of the two gets the first open proposition of the series. When running around looking for Tanya, in what is otherwise an incredibly stupid episode, another student confesses her feelings to Jessie and asks if she can call her onee-sama; she suggests that they could start off by training in sports, but maybe they could segue into this and that. Jessie replies that she appreciates the thought, but isn’t interested.(This whole scene reminded me strongly of the old schoolness again, because the translation just sort of plays fast and loose with what’s being said. “Onee-sama” is not translated as big sister, much less kept as is. They sort of randomly assign words to what the classmate is saying. And Jessie’s “I have no interest” is, as often is the case for some reason in anime, translated as “I don’t swing that way.” Another phrase I’d like to see corrected in current anime translation. “Thank you for the thought, but I’m not interested in that” is so much less crude than, “No, I don’t swing that way.” Jessie is voiced by Itou Miki and speaks in a tone reminiscent of Sachiko’s formal voice – I really just don’t see her being that crude. But hey, this was translated a gazillion years ago before Onee-samas and Yuri ever made it to the shores of America. So I’ll let this one slide, but I would like to see it done correctly going forward.)

The final episode on the volume is Yuri enough for most, as it follows Ayla’s growing obsession with Jessie, and ends in a swimming match. For many, many reasons, I loved this episode. Mostly for the swimming. I swam competitively as a kid (without ever being good, mind you) and my love for swimming has never left me. Watching these two women swimming and obsessing about each other was definitely my happy place for the day. ^_^

So, I gotta say, Volume 1 was a lot more Yuri than I remembered it being. And it was a good chunk of fun too.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 7
Characters – Everyone other than Akari – 8. Akari – 5
Yuri – 5
Service – 5

Overall – 7

Let me also mention that I have reviewed the Battle Athletes series as a whole, Volume 3 and Volume 6, previously, should you be interested.